Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (3 page)

Platte City was just eighteen miles down a dirt road from Fort McPherson, headquarters of the US Army’s 5th Cavalry. A captain of the cavalry was in town when Stanley and Cook checked into their hotel. Taking one look at the bedraggled travellers, the captain accused Stanley and Cook of being deserters from the army post at Fort Laramie, up the North Fork of the Platte. He ordered them not to leave Platte City until he could check their status. Just to make sure they stayed in town, the captain ordered two of his soldiers to keep Stanley and Cook under surveillance.

Not only did Stanley refuse to be intimidated, he seemed to revel in disregarding authority. He calmly went about his business, eating a meal in the small hotel and stocking up on food and ammunition for the remaining few hundred miles to Omaha, where the Platte and Missouri combined. The fact that his every movement was being watched didn’t fluster Stanley.

After spending the night in town, Stanley and Cook paid their hotel bill and made to leave. The captain had been warned by his men, and was waiting for the erstwhile journalists. ‘Shall I put you under arrest?’ he said, squaring off in front of Stanley.

There was little about Stanley that was physically intimidating. His nose was unbroken. His ears lacked a fighter’s cauliflower. He had no visible scars. His hands ran to small and had a curiously reddish tint. There was an omnipresent look of childlike confusion in his eyes. Yet Stanley glared at the captain with a menace Cook had never witnessed before. Placing one hand on his revolver, Stanley calmly agreed with the captain. ‘Yes,’ he said, clearly willing to shoot. ‘If you have men enough to do it.’

The captain let them pass.

On 12 June 1866 Stanley arrived in New York City. His ungainly search for success was under way. More important, Stanley had begun travelling east as Livingstone
worked his way west. As the miles between them decreased, the adventures that would ensue — random and whimsical at first, then linear and relentless — had begun, as well. Not even Stanley, with his enormous capacity for bluster and outlandish dreams, could imagine all that lay ahead.

Sir Richard Francis Burton
© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

John Hanning Speke
© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

THE CATALYST FOR
the saga of daring took place shortly after eleven in the morning on Friday, 16 September 1864. Richard Francis Burton stood alone on the wooden speaker’s platform at the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual convention, awaiting his debate opponent. His wife Isabel sat a few feet behind. He clutched a sheaf of arguments. He was strong but narrow in the shoulders and hips, like a matador. His eyes were so dark brown they were often described as black. His moustache, truly black, flowed over and around his lips to his chin. The legendary Somali scars ran up his cheeks like slender compass arrows pointing north. He remained calm as he watched the doors for John Hanning Speke’s entrance. The fair-haired geographical hero with the cold blue eyes was Burton’s opposite, and Burton had waited six years to settle their rivalry. A few minutes more meant little.

The audience felt differently. It had been a wet, cramped morning and they were lathering up into a
righteous fury. There had been rumours of a cancellation due to some sort of injury to Speke, but the almost two thousand adventurers, dignitaries, journalists and celebrity gazers came anyway. They braved a howling rain to get seats for what the newspapers were calling the Nile Duel, as if the debate was a bare-knuckle prizefight instead of a defining moment in history. Burton and Speke would argue who had discovered the Source of the Nile River — the most consuming geographical riddle of all time. Curiously, Burton and Speke made their conflicting Source discoveries during the same expedition. They had been partners. And even as they made plans to destroy one another, Burton and Speke suppressed deep mutual compassion.

They were former friends — lovers, some whispered — turned enemies. Theirs was a ‘story of adventure, jealousy and recrimination, which painted their achievements in bright or lurid lights and tragic shades’, in the words of Sir Bartle Frere, Governor of Bombay. Each man’s aim was not just claiming the Nile, but destroying the other socially, professionally and financially. The winner would know a permanent spot in the history books. The loser would be labelled a delusional, presumptuous fool, with all the public ridicule that implied.

Speke was a thin loner whose family home, Jordans, was just forty miles from Bath. He was childlike, titled, wealthy, bland, deaf in one ear. At thirty-seven, he doted on his mother and had never courted any woman. Critics acknowledged his prowess as a sportsman, but puzzled over his penchant for slaughter and fondness for eating the unborn foetus of a kill. They wondered about the character of a man who once gave a rifle as a gift to an African chief fond of shooting subjects for fun, and who allowed a live human child to be steamed like a lobster during a tribal ritual in his honour. Speke felt that the ends justified the means — in his case, finding the Source was worth the inconsequential loss of African lives. The Source, Speke claimed, was a massive rectangular body of water the size of Scotland. He named it Victoria Nyanza — Lake Victoria — for the Queen.

The dark-haired Burton claimed Lake Tanganyika as the Source. That body of water lay 150 miles south-west of Victoria Nyanza, separated by mountainous, unexplored jungle. Burton did not dispute that the Nile flowed from Victoria, but he believed that another, yet undiscovered, river flowed from Tanganyika through the mountains, into Victoria.

Lake Tanganyika’s shape was slender and vertical on the map, like a womb parting to give birth to the great Nile. Its choice as Burton’s geographical talisman was apt, for his character tics veered towards the sensual. The accomplished linguist had a fondness for Arab prostitutes and would one day write the first English translation of the
Kama Sutra
. In 1845, as a young army officer stationed in India, he’d been ordered to investigate Karachi’s homosexual brothels. Burton’s detailed reportage implicated fellow officers and gave rise to suspicion about his own sexuality — both of which combined to ruin his career. So he’d become an explorer. His knowledge of languages and Islam allowed him to infiltrate cities such as Mecca and Harar which were forbidden to non-Muslims. The resulting books about those escapades were bestsellers in the mid-1850s, earning Burton a reputation for daring while introducing Oriental thoughts and words to his readers. It was Burton who made the term
safari
— Swahili for ‘journey’ — familiar to the English-speaking world.

The mob packing the auditorium, so eager for spectacle and rage, knew the Burton and Speke story well. The time had come for resolution. When the eleven o’clock starting time came and passed, the crowd ‘gave vent to its impatience by sounds more often heard from the audience of a theatre than a scientific meeting’, sniffed the Bath
Chronicle
. The audience gossiped loudly about Speke’s whereabouts and stared at the stage, scrutinizing Burton with that unflinching gaze reserved for the very famous. In an era when no occupation was more glamorous than African explorer, Burton’s features were already well known through photographs and sketches from his books. But for many in the audience, seeing his face up
close, in person, was why they’d come. They felt the same about Speke.

There was a third explorer many hoped to glimpse, a man whose legend was arguably greater than any living explorer. ‘The room’, the
Chronicle
noted of the auditorium, ‘was crowded with ladies and gentlemen who were radiant with the hope of seeing Dr Livingstone.’ The British public hadn’t caught a glimpse of their beloved Livingstone since the halcyon days of 1857 when he seemed to be everywhere at once. His exploits had been a balm for the wounds of the Crimean War, the ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade and the bloody slaughter of British women and children during the Indian Mutiny. Livingstone reminded Victorian Britain of her potential for greatness. The fifty-one-year-old Scot was their hero archetype, an explorer brave, pious, and humble; so quick with a gun that Waterloo hero the Duke of Wellington nicknamed Livingstone ‘the fighting parson’. Livingstone was equally at home wandering the wilds of Africa and making small talk over tea with the Queen. The public made his books bestsellers, his speeches standing-room only, his name household. Livingstone was beloved in Britain, and so famous worldwide that one poll showed that only Victoria herself was better known.

Livingstone, though, wasn’t scheduled to appear at the Nile Duel. His first public appearance since returning from an exploration of Africa’s Zambezi River six months earlier was officially supposed to take place the following Monday. He would lecture the British Association on the details of that journey. Ticket demand was so enormous that Livingstone, standing before a massive map of Africa, would give the speech live in one theatre as Clements Markham of the Royal Geographical Society read it concurrently to the overflow crowd in a second auditorium. The
Chronicle
’s special edition would publish the text in its entirety.

Rumours, however, said Livingstone would make an appearance at the Nile Duel as moderator. His appearance would confirm the Duel’s heft, counterbalance smirks of
innuendo. For celebrity gazers and scientists alike, Livingstone, Burton and Speke on the same stage would elevate the proceedings from grudge match to intellectual field day. Those three greats hurling geographical barbs would make the long hours in the rain more than worthwhile.

Ironically, the crowd was unaware that the larger-than-life Livingstone was enduring a season of tumultuous upheaval. His problems had begun with the five-year journey up the Zambezi. The expedition had accomplished a great deal. But many of his companions died during the journey — including Livingstone’s wife, Mary, who had been so desperate to be with him she left the safety of England to venture into Africa to find him, then joined the expedition halfway through the journey. Because of the deaths, the failure of a highly touted project that would have established Christian missions in the African interior and reports that Livingstone was an inept leader, the British Government viewed the Zambezi expedition as a débâcle. Hence,
The Times
questioned Livingstone’s judgement, he was
persona non grata
at the Foreign Office — his place of employment — and influential Christian politician William Gladstone quietly severed their relationship.

Financially, Livingstone was almost destitute. Even as friends urged him to retire and spend time with his children, he needed one last great geographical discovery so he could write the bestselling book about his travels that would provide for him and his family. ‘I don’t know whether I am to go on the shelf or not,’ he wrote to a friend, acknowledging that the Foreign Office might never let him lead another expedition, but vowing to return to Africa nonetheless. ‘If I do, I make Africa the shelf.’